Pixel Art Animation Process
Here is a quick video showing a little bit of my animation process. Working on a simple attack animation for a new axe weapon I’m prototyping at the moment.
Hopefully it’s interesting for pixel artists out there 🙂
Crawl Art Process Vid 1...
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Oh hey, so there are actually human beings behind this game? :,D
Nice, thanks for sharing your progress Barney! 🙂
Watching this while working on my own stuff right now …
hehe cheers, I hope it’s useful- I’d like to do at least one of these every week (at least every week I get to work on art!) and try to do Dev diaries with Dave too where we discuss what we’re working on and playtest the latest build a bit 🙂
No question, it’s useful and totally inspiring! 🙂
Figured you’re responsible for the slurpy-slime
sound effects too → nice cup btw. hahaha. :,D
Yes please, that’s a nice idea!
Would like a »peek into the crypt«! 🙂
This is awesome! I was stoked to see an update (I check everyday) and let alone an animation video! Started watching this just now. Barney, I just started doing pixel art, can you tell me what you think of my games main character http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2015/057/7/e/run_jump_jet_by_gregypo085-d8jlgmr.gif ? Keep up the great work! Crawl is one of my favorite games 🙂
P.S. I made this using Pyxel Edit. It’s $9 and great for animation!
great work dude- design and animation are both solid!
my only advice would be to give him a little vertical movement in the run animation. probably something small to have his head bobbing up and down by 1 pixel each step 🙂
Thanks so much Barney, that’s awesome to hear coming from you!
This is so great, thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge.
You guys use Unity, right? Can you do some videos where you integrate your animations into Unity?
yep, some time I’ll go through the entire process of implementing in unity too 🙂
I would love to see that as well!
Awesome!!! That makes me super happy.
Awesome! I want to see Unity implementation too! Thanks for sharing your process!
I appreciate the video, It takes a lot of effort and time to do what you’re doing.
Since you are doing a heavy axe you should do a hammer as well 😉 always been a fan of smashing enemies. It could work just like the axe just slower more damage and a chance to stun?
Looking forward to more from you guys, Still love how it says its the early development, when your game is better than most that are completed.
hehe cheers 😀 yep if the axe works out, Id love to do big war-hammers as well, just depends if i can make them look cool at that low resolution!
Another cool weapon could be a mace, whip, or a bo staff! Also Unity is awesome!
yep i’ve wanted to do a mace for a long time- i have an idea of a funny way to make it work 🙂
Had been subscribed to y’all on YouTube, was super glad to see something like this come up. Seriously means a lot to see you guys share some of your process.
This just further adds into my reasoning for Powerhoof being my favorite game studio. Thanks guys.
cheers 🙂 i’ve been meaning to get doing some videos for a while now, so it feels good to have such positive response- looking forward to making more!
So noob question here but at about 2:22 of the video when you erased just the arms/axe, what did you do there? Did you select a certain part or color and erase it or did you just freehand erase with your skills? Thanks and thanks for the video. Great to see stuff like this.
just freehand erasing and using pencil to draw back the body that should be behind it.
if it was a much more complicated charter i might keep the arms on a separate layer so i can edit them without messing with the body, but this guy is so simple it just takes a second to erase/redraw bits so i tend to collapse onto one layer most of the time
And replying to lowly comments. <3
:)!
That emoticon… smiling loudly?
Great video! A bit off topic question, but have you given any thought to have special stats or apearences of your human based on the god you chose? Great game!
Yeah, some heroes could have capes or wear helmets
And these different physical features could represent the buffs your god gave you!
yep, i’d absolutely love to have visual differences between heroes- the problem is the hero has 1500 frames or more, and i’d have to redraw every frame for every possible combination of item difference!
i do have a couple of ideas of little tricks i can try to make it less work and get a little customization, but it seems pretty unlikely at this point unfortunately- just a limitation of doing animation-heavy 2d art unfortunately
What I would like to see is choosing the colour for your character yourself, not limit it to the order of joining. I really want to play as the yellow, even when there are less than four players.
So cool! Thanks for sharing this.
no worries 🙂
this is insanely helpful for me as an amateur pixel art animator. thank you so GOD DAMNED MUCH!
PS your game is kinda the best thing around
Thank you so much for doing this video, it was really inspiring to watch. Your animations are SO good. I’m glad to hear you’ll try to do at least one a week from now on!
You should make IT so enchanted weapons match the enchantment. That way if it has te ice enchantment it would be blue. Keep up the good work I love this game it has so much potential bad could grow to be the best local multiplayer game
Also The obstacles you added in the bone warden update are good cause it adds a new type of game like you can have a choke point and can let you atack around corners and there is so much yo can do with monsters that have bounce attacks. It’s okay for the bow but you have to know what your doing other wise it’s just cover for the monsters
What pixel art program do you use ?
I use photoshop 🙂 there are some older posts on the site going into how i set up photoshop specifically for pixel animation
Seriously you do it all on photo shop!! That really cool. You have inspired me to try pixel art thanks.
Barney, you make me want to give up being a 3D artist and start pixel animation. For reals brutha.
I grew up on an Amiga 500 and your work and Crawl make me all warm and fuzzy – amazing work!
thanks so much 🙂 all my years working I the industry I was doing 3d animation- i think that’s why I wanted to try something hand drawn once I quit- just for a change- and it turned out really fun!
It’s pretty silly that no companies would pay me for doing this kind of pixel animation even though it’s so much cooler than the boring 3d stuff I used to animate for them haha 🙂